“You Only Think About These Things Because You’re Gay”: Queering Difference in a Multicultural Education Course

• In Event: Disrupting “Safe Spaces” With Queer Bodies: Exploring Perceptions of Safety and Vulnerability as Teachers and Researchers

Abstract

Purpose:
Multicultural education courses are designed to foster awareness of and appreciation for a variety of categories of difference within teacher preparation; despite these aims, these courses remain steeped in heteronormative and homophobic attitudes, often never addressing issues of gender and sexuality (Gorski, Davis, & Reiter, n.d.). This presentation will examine the ways in which owning my identity as both a former early childhood educator and as an out, gay male impacted the ways in which my students experienced a multicultural education class that addressed issues of gender and sexuality.

Theory:
Autoethnography is both process and product, seeking to understand cultural experiences through systemic analysis of personal experiences (Holman Jones, 2005). Ethnographic research is necessarily political, socially-just, and socially-conscious (Adams & Holman Jones, 2008). Autoethnography is closely linked to queer theory, sharing similar understandings of identities as fluid, changing, and open to multiple interpretations (Butler, 2004). This presentation builds on these imbalances to construct accounts of “trouble” in the teaching of gender and sexuality in a multicultural education course.

Inquiry Methods and Data:
Data comes from teaching journals over two semesters of teaching a multicultural education course at a regional, public university. These teaching journals include notes about class readings, preparations for classroom discussions, descriptions of classes themselves, and personal debriefings. These journals will be used in ways commensurate with analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006), identifying patterns in the insights and stories told to comment on the larger social phenomenon of gender and sexuality inclusion in multicultural education courses within teacher education.

Insights:
While multicultural education courses should be inclusive of the identities of those who instruct within them (Zeichner, Grant, Gay, Gillette, & Valli, 1998), my presence created both tensions and spaces for exploration in regards to gender and sexuality in relation to education. These larger these are explored in three acts.

Act One: Waiting Outside My Office
This act seeks to understand how my own identity claims within the class fostered student exploration of gender and sexuality difference through several conversations with a student grappling with their religious beliefs and personal realities.

Act Two: But That’s Your Opinion
This act seeks to understand the tensions inherent in a heated debate that erupted over a film watched in class, calling into question whether gender and sexuality needed to be considered in elementary contexts.

Act Three: What Do You Mean You Don’t Want Marriage?
This act explores the ways in which my own lived politics around my identity shaped class understandings of gender and sexuality within the course. Calling marriage into question, students were challenged to rethink their conceptions of a “gay agenda.”

Significance:
While discussions of safe spaces tend to revolve around the role of students within higher education, this paper seeks to explore the boundaries of safe spaces for myself as a gay instructor. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which I played with the boundaries of safe space to challenge student understandings as well as develop awareness of gender and sexuality in elementary education.

Author

• Nicholas Edward Husbye